TY - JOUR
AU - Bushway,Shawn D.
AU - Owens,Emily G.
AU - Piehl,Anne Morrison
TI - Sentencing Guidelines and Judicial Discretion: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Human Calculation Errors
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 16961
PY - 2011
Y2 - April 2011
DO - 10.3386/w16961
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16961
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16961.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Shawn Bushway
Rockefeller College
University at Albany, SUNY
135 Western Avenue
Albany, NY 12222 USA
E-Mail: sbushway@albany.edu
Emily G. Owens
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Criminology
3718 Locust Walk, McNeil Building
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6286
Tel: 215-746-2076
Fax: 215-898-6891
E-Mail: emilyo@sas.upenn.edu
Anne Piehl
Department of Economics
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
New Jersey Hall
75 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1248
E-Mail: apiehl@economics.rutgers.edu
AB - There is a debate about whether advisory non-binding sentencing guidelines affect the sentences outcomes of individuals convicted in jurisdictions with this sentencing framework. Identifying the impact of sentencing guidelines is a difficult empirical problem because court actors may have preferences for sentencing severity that are correlated with the preferences that are outlined in the guidelines. But, in Maryland, ten percent of the recommended sentences computed in the guideline worksheets contain calculation errors. We use this unique source of quasi-experimental variation to quantify the extent to which sentencing guidelines influence policy outcomes. Among drug offenses, we find that the direct impact of the guidelines is roughly ½ the size of the overall correlation between recommendations and outcomes. For violent offenses, we find the same ½ discount for sentence recommendations that are higher than they should have been, but more responsiveness to recommendations that are too low. We find no evidence that the guidelines themselves directly affect discretion for property offenders, perhaps because judges generally have substantial experience with property cases and therefore do not rely on the errant information. Sentences are more sensitive to both accurate and inaccurate recommendations for crimes that occur less frequently and have more complicated sentencing. This suggests that when the court has more experience, the recommendations have less influence. More tentative findings suggest that, further down the decision chain, parole boards counteract the remaining influence of the guidelines.
ER -